By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – Jan 10, 2025

Sacramento tilts at reducing temperatures while its cities burn from failure to adapt to a variable climate.

Democrats blame the L.A. blazes on the changing climate, which is a convenient excuse as citizens rage against the failures of state and local government. The evidence doesn’t support the climate explanation since (among other reasons) California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds, even with hurricane-force gusts on occasion, for centuries. If the Democrats who run the state believe their own advertising, why not spend money in useful ways rather than on a green-energy transition to nowhere?

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Start with water, which has become a political flashpoint after fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods ran dry. Donald Trump in particular is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom for scrapping his first-term plan to ease fish protections to let more water flow from the north to farmers and cities in Southern California. He’s half right.

Mr. Trump has a point that Democrats in Sacramento have badly mismanaged water. The state never has enough to go around because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack—one of the state’s largest natural reservoirs—gets flushed out to the Pacific Ocean rather than stored for dry years.

Farmers received only 50% of their allocation this past year despite two wet winters. Mr. Trump is right that the species protections he cited are largely to blame, and Democrats refuse to take on the environmental lobby.

But increasing water flows from northern California wouldn’t have helped firefighters in L.A. since the problem there was an overwhelmed local water system.

The region’s water infrastructure was built more than a century ago to fight house fires, not conflagrations like this week’s. Water tanks were filled to capacity before the fires, but three that supplied the Palisades were quickly tapped out. Huge demand caused a loss of pressure, which made it harder to pump water uphill to refill the tanks.

As a result, firefighters had to rely on massive tanker trucks—powered by good ol’ diesel fuel—to deliver hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. A nearby reservoir that was undergoing repairs might have helped maintain pressure somewhat longer had it been full. It’s also possible larger pipes and tanks could have helped firefighters at the margin.

But renovating the water system to bolster its firefighting capacity is costly. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the local municipal utility, is struggling merely to maintain its sprawling system. Its 7,337 miles of pipes on average are more than 60 years old. Most older water systems in California also aren’t equipped to fight wildfires.

If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities. And California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.

Democrats have in particular given priority to reducing CO2 emissions over mitigating the effects of a variable climate. The state’s renewable-energy mandates have forced Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to spend heavily on wind, solar and battery power, at the expense of upgrading its aging power lines that have sparked some of the state’s most catastrophic fires.

Mr. Newsom has lately increased spending for wildfire mitigation, including tree thinning, though it may be too little, too late to prevent new and raging fires. Given the hurricane-force gusts, it’s hard to know whether more fire breaks and brush clearing might have reduced the damage from the Los Angeles fires. Even so, the state spends more on “fighting” climate change than preparing for it.

The Governor’s budget last year included $2.6 billion for “forest and wildfire resilience”—far less than the $14.7 billion provisioned for zero-emission vehicles and its “clean energy” transition. California’s $100 billion bullet train and offshore wind turbines will do nothing to prevent fires or protect communities. Rooftop solar subsidies are no consolation for people who lose their homes.

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More broadly, nothing California does to subsidize EVs or punish fossil fuels will have any effect on global temperature. Its CO2 emission reductions are dwarfed by increases elsewhere, including emissions from fires. Their climate policies are pure political virtue signaling to please the climate lobby.

But the state can do more to mitigate the harm from future fires and better use its natural water supply to cope with dry years. It’s time for Democrats to choose which is more important: Their climate obsessions or citizens.

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Source: California’s Climate Time for Choosing – WSJ